Loopt Location To Update In The Background On iPhone — Loopt, a location-based social networking service, will be the first third-party iPhone service to work in the background while the app is not running. — Via a deal with AT&T, and with your permission, Loopt will be able to access …

Samsung: OLED notebooks by late 2010 — Global computing boss targets release a year from now — Samsung says we could get the first commercial OLED laptops a year from now. — Speaking at the official IFA launch of the X-Series and N-Series notebooks and netbooks, Kyu Uhm …

How Team of Geeks Cracked Spy Trade — PALO ALTO, Calif. — From a Silicon Valley office strewn with bean-bag chairs, a group of twenty-something software engineers is building an unlikely following of terrorist hunters at U.S. spy agencies. — One of the latest entrants …

China's Potential Crackdown on Music Piracy — China's Ministry of Culture has issued a new online music policy that will regulate online music content and potentially reduce the level of music piracy. — Pali Research has already warned that this policy will significantly affect search engine Baidu …

Gov 2.0: It's All About The Platform — Editor's note: The following guest post is by Tim O'Reilly, the founder and CEO of computer book publisher O'Reilly Media and a conference organizer. O'Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 five years ago. Now he is arguing it is time for Gov 2.0 …

Dish Told to Pay TiVo Almost $200 Million Over Patent — Sept. 4 (Bloomberg) — Dish Network Corp. and EchoStar Corp. were told to pay almost $200 million to TiVo Inc. for contempt of an order that it stop providing its DVR service after losing a patent-infringement ruling.

Snow Leopard, Marble, And Calamine Lotion — There are two types of people in the world: Those that hate change, and those that embrace it. I tend to fall into the latter category. And that's why OS X Snow Leopard is an odd product for me. — On one hand, I like the idea that Apple …

RSS Is Alive And Well — Somehow the comments on my “10 Characteristics of Great Companies” post yesterday drifted into the topic of the future of RSS. I was debating whether to wade into this silly debate about whether “RSS is dead” or not and was leaning toward ignoring it.

WebOS 1.2 Accidentally Leaked! — go4craig in our Palm Pre Forums has just posted that he applied the webOS Doctor (the ‘last resort’ method for getting your Pre back to factory standard) and, wonder of wonders, it installed webOS 1.2 for him. Guess what - same thing happened for forum member Leathal.

Mozilla to protect Adobe Flash users — The upcoming Firefox 3.5.3 and Firefox 3.0.14 releases, currently in beta, will check the version of Adobe Flash plug-in installed in the browser and warn the user if that plug-in is out of date. Johnathan Nightingale, “Human Shield” (Security Lead) …

Is Google Using A Privacy Double Standard? — There is a much longer post to be written on Google's privacy policies and its history of combatting or complying with government requests for information and those of third parties using the courts to get access to user data.

Spectrial 2: Pirate Bay Appeal Scheduled for November — Millions of BitTorrent users all around the world followed the Pirate Bay trial with great interest this February. Many had hoped that the Court would decide that operating a BitTorrent tracker is no offense, and indeed the ten …

Four new themes — Posted by Jake Knapp, UI Designer and Manu Cornet, Software Engineer — Manu: Hey Jake, you still using that same old theme? — Jake: Well, yeah. I mean, I like it — but I don't know... I guess it just doesn't feel as new as it used to. — Manu: I hear ya. Well, good news!

Bit.ly Offering Even Shorter ‘J.mp’ URLs — Bit.ly, Twitter's official URL shortening service, is offering even shorter URLs, via a new ‘j.mp’ service. — We just popped open our bit.ly sidebar to send a tweet and got this new URL tool instead. By knocking out two characters from the URL …

Old WordPress Versions Under Attack — Otto42 of OttoDestruct, a key WordPress developer and supporter, reports that there is an “attack” on older versions of WordPress right now. The number of sites hit by this is growing every hour. Protect your WordPress blog now: UPDATE NOW!!!

Techie-Conference Smackdown — An upcoming New York arts and technology event, dubbed the Audience Conference, is scheduled for Nov. 5 and 6, but it's managed to ruffle some techie feathers well in advance. … Several of its speakers, including TechCrunch's Michael Arrington …